


ravaging of claws and teeth

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: ain't licked yet [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Hospitals, M/M, Major Character Injury, Meeting the Parents, Multi, Pagan Kent Parson, Paganism, Polyamory, Sickbeds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:18:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7646338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the third day Kent wakes up when they’re in the room and his mom’s not and he can say, "What the fuck happened?”</p><p>“Coyote bit you on the ass,” Maida says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ravaging of claws and teeth

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written [as a not!fic Tumblr post](http://des-zimbits.tumblr.com/post/144423160271/des-zimbits-honestly-when-i-imagine-kent-parson). _Ain't Licked Yet_ is a series being written irregularly and out-of-order, about Kent Parson's career-ending injury and what happened after.

They find out about Kent from the cover of the fucking newspaper.

They don't watch hockey-they don't even own a TV-and nobody called them when he got hurt.  Luis has gone into town to buy a coffee and there it is, on the front of the newspaper on the box at the curb: PARSON FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE.  A black ragdoll on the ice, medics heading for him.

Kent doesn’t answer his phone, of course, and the teammate Maida has a number for doesn’t know what’s going on and finally they call Kent’s sister, who’s able to give them relevant information, like: Kent’s in this hospital and this ICU and was briefly conscious this morning and Mom and I have set up camp in his apartment.

When they show up at the hospital Kent’s sister has to come down and intervene to get them let up, and they sit nervously together in plastic chairs in the hallway.  Kent’s sister knew he was dating them but his mother didn’t and his mother is Not. Impressed.  "I don’t see how serious he could have been if he was dating both of them at the same time" style of not impressed, “Why did they feel the need to show up, it’s family and close friends” not impressed.  Stressed to the gills and looking for someone she can lash out at about the fact that her son is on death’s doorstep.  

They recognize a coping mechanism that runs in the family when they see one and are ready to retreat to a waiting room further away to squeeze the life out of each other’s hands and conclude that maybe they should not have told Kent to stop stressing about labels and systems.  But then Kent’s sister reappears towing Bad Bob, who is the local avatar of sanity.  Luis has a brief bad moment of thinking that wow, Kent’s ex is a lot older than he thought he was, that makes the entire relationship way creepier in retrospect.  Meanwhile Bob does what passes for a smile and says, “Maria, right?”

“Maida,” she says in a little voice.

“Maida, sorry.  I forgot.  I remember that you’re a falconer, right?”

“What?” Karen Parson asks, stressed and brittle.

“Not the team,” Bob says, looking back at her, trying to introduce two hostile, wary cats.

“A falconer like, I train raptors to, uh, sit on my arm? And fly at a target?”  Maida raises her arm to demonstrate.  "I work for a wildlife rescue.“

"Kent took her to the NHL awards last year,” Bob tells Karen.  "When I met her she had her arm all bandaged up where a hawk slashed at her.“

Maida looks down at her hands, which have three bandages and a host of old and half-healed scars.  "Yeah, it’s part of the job.”

Karen keeps staring at her and doesn’t say anything but she lets Bob put his arm around her and say, “I think you should head back to the apartment for a nap, the hospital will call if anything changes.  You’ll be ten minutes away.”  He gently herds her away.  

Kent’s sister gestures nervously at Maida.  "He’s this way.“

Maida goes and collects Luis, who has pulled up Bad Bob’s Wikipedia page on his phone and sorted out which Zimmermann is which.  They get to go into his room and watch their boyfriend sleep.  Later that night when they’ve driven all the way back to their trailer he wakes up and talks with his mom, long enough to let her know that he wants them to be able to visit him and that he’d _like_ if somebody could arrange for both her and them to have a place to sleep in Las Vegas.  His mom gets very offended and moves into a hotel, stiffly telling Luis and Maida the next morning that the apartment is theirs to use and offering a key in an outstretched fist.

"We have our own keys,” Luis says.  "We just didn’t want to disturb you.“  Which somehow reignites Karen’s dislike of them, the same way she is personally offended that Kit Purrson doesn’t want to be picked up and held on her lap.  But Luis and Maida move into Kent’s apartment and look after his cat, the way they’ve done sometimes before.  A neighbour looks after their chickens; Luis quits his bartending job and Maida drives herself to exhaustion covering all her shifts and driving an hour and a half back to the city after.

On the third day Kent wakes up when they’re in the room and his mom’s not and he can say, "What the _fuck_ happened?”

“Coyote bit you on the ass,” Maida says.  Coyote isn’t even in her pantheon, mostly because until she met Kent she’d encounter something even vaguely Coyote-esque and say, _nope, fuck this shit, I’m out_ , but that highly developed early warning system was exactly why she knew Kent for about fifteen minutes before concluding that he was one of Coyote’s favourite humans _._  And this is exactly why she doesn’t like Coyote or Kent’s Fortuna, because they pull shit like this: they take you when you’re on top of the world and fling you around like a rag doll, smack you on the ground and leave you broken with all the luck bleeding out of your head.

Luis actually answers him, actually says the warm and soothing things, because Luis actually has a gift for healing.  Maida doesn’t, even though when Kent starts crying and accidentally dislodges his IV when he moves to cover his face she’s the one who catches the line and puts a kink in it to stop saline solution from spraying out everywhere, she’s the one who can pull out an alcohol wipe and thread the IV back into his vein.  Maida doesn’t have a gift for healing, she just has medical knowledge.  All the gifts she has on her own are about fortune-telling and invocation.  The closest she comes to healing is being able to carry some of Luis’s magic with her and being able to sit next to torn-up broken beings and bandage them up while they find the healing in themselves.

The best rehabs for Kent to be in and the majority of his support system are in New York, where she’s been before; three days in the muggy temperate broadleaf forests left her wanting to claw her own skin off and flee back to the desert.  She actively hates hospitals, hates the city, is beginning to hate Kent’s mom and by extension the entire human race.  

It’s why she grits her teeth and bears it when Luis moves with Kent to New York for two months, because Luis is the one who’s actually any good at any of this.  Kent is worried about leaving her alone, so she cages up the chickens to leave them with a friend and moves in with her aunt.  When Luis comes back from moving Kent out of the rehab and into an apartment in Manhattan with homecare aides to help him she moves back into her house, puts her hencoop and her garden back together, but she hates that she’s leaving her boyfriend in the hands of distant strangers.  She hopes they love him.  That they’re kind.

The next time she sees a coyote on the side of the road she pulls her car over to the shoulder.  It clears out, trotting about fifty feet away, then stops and looks back at her.

“Fuck you,” she says.  "When you’re finished with whatever the fuck you want to teach him, you give him back to me, you hear?“

The coyote twitches its ears, watching her suspiciously for another minute, before turning around and running into the desert.


End file.
